Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Für die Kinder von Gestern, Heute und Morgen

Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the 2004 Next Wave Festival at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette St., Brooklyn, NYC, Nov. 16-21.

Every seat in the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House was filled for the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its reigning monarch, Pina Bausch, who in her 20-year relationship with BAM has never failed to deliver an evening of dance-theatre that is tasteful, telling, and beautifully performed, even if one only pretends to understand all the nuances and symbolism.

Where to begin praise for Bausch's heavy-titled (in German) collection of vignettes assembled together to create three hours of hypnotic theatre? Within its many segments, each with its own special flavor, there is the luscious physicality and intricate choreography, with more humor and playfulness than remembered from her previous pieces. The piece begins when one young man climbs through an oversized window opening in a stark white paneled set to undertake a series of pratfalls sideways off a bench, caught by the ankle of another dancer just before crashing. From there the company is off and running: The men zoom from wing to wing, one skateboards, one propels himself across the stage while flung over a wheeled stool. And we haven't really seen the women yet, especially the sturdy veteran Nazareth Panadero, enunciating in her accented English the advantages of a cigar.

Bausch's eclectic cast of women ranges from waifs to runway models, each one a brilliant dancer and as seductive on patent-leather stilettos as she is barefoot. All have loose, flowing hair used as another prop: yanked, flung, braided, or hung loose to frame the high-cheekboned faces—the trademark stamp of Bausch's casting choices. The women brush their hair with brooms or part it with the high heel of a shoe, and stare straight on into a rapt audience, daring them to say a word. The men in barber chairs get make-believe shaves and cuts; a couple sit on air-filled plastic shopping bags for pillows, or prepare wet sand for a sand castle—and what about the tale of the resurrected squirrel who becomes the first bat? The list goes on.